Andrea Mantegna, (born 1431, Isola di Cartura [near Vicenza], Republic of Venice [Italy]—died September 13, 1506, Mantua) painter and engraver, the first fully Renaissance artist of northern Italy. His best known surviving work is the Camera degli Sposi (“Room of the Bride and Groom”), or Camera Picta (“Painted Room”) (1474), in the Palazzo Ducale of Mantua, for which he developed a self-consistent illusion of a total environment. Mantegna’s other principal works include the Ovetari Chapel frescoes (1448–55) in the Eremitani Church in Padua and the Triumph of Caesar (begun c. 1486), the pinnacle of his late style.

Arrival of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, fresco by Andrea Mantegna, …

Palzza Ducale, Mantua, Italy/SuperStock

Formative years in Padua

Mantegna’s extraordinary native abilities were recognized early. He was the second son of a woodworker but was legally adopted by Francesco Squarcione by the time he was 10 years old and possibly even earlier. A teacher of painting and a collector of antiquities in Padua, Squarcione drew the cream of young local talent to his studio, which some of his protégés, such as Mantegna and the painter Marco Zoppo, later had cause to regret. In 1448, at age 17, Mantegna disassociated himself from Squarcione’s guardianship to establish his own workshop in Padua, later claiming that Squarcione had profited considerably from his services without giving due recompense. The award to Mantegna of the important commission for an altarpiece for the church of Santa Sofia (1448), now lost, demonstrates his precocity, since it was unusual for so young an artist to receive such a commission. Mantegna himself proudly called attention to his youthful ability in the painting’s inscription: “Andrea Mantegna from Padua, aged 17, painted this with his own hand, 1448.”

During the following year (1449), Mantegna worked on the fresco decoration of the Ovetari Chapel in the Eremitani Church in Padua. The figures of Saints Peter, Paul, and Christopher in the apse, his earliest frescoes in this chapel, show to what extent he had already absorbed the monumental figure style of Tuscany. In the St. James Led to Martyrdom in the lowest row on the left wall, painted sometime between 1453 and 1455, both Mantegna’s mastery of di sotto in su (from below to above) perspective and his use of archaeologically correct details of Roman architecture are already apparent. The perspective scheme with a viewpoint below the lower frame of the composition exaggerates the apparent height of the scene with respect to the viewer and lends an aspect of grandiose monumentality to the triumphal arch.

The Adoration of the Shepherds, tempera on canvas by Andrea Mantegna, …

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St. James Led to Martyrdom, detail of a fresco (destroyed in World War …

In the two scenes from the life of St. Christopher united in a single perspective on the right-hand wall, Mantegna extended his experiments in illusionism to the framing element by painting a highly realistic column on the front plane. The meticulously detailed column divides the scene in two while appearing to exist in a realm totally apart from the pictorial space, a realm shared with the observer. This extension of illusionistic principles to the elements surrounding a picture anticipates Mantegna’s San Zeno altarpiece, where the carved half columns of the frame abut the painted piers (vertical members) on the front plane of the picture space, so that the frame architecture serves as the exterior of the temple-pavilion architecture depicted in the painting. In this way the sphere of intense ideality inhabited by the Virgin Mary is conjoined to the beholder’s own space by a brilliant combination of physical and optical devices. Unfortunately, all Mantegna’s frescoes in the Ovetari Chapel except The Assumption and The Martyrdom of St. Christopher were destroyed by a bomb during World War II.

The environment of the city of Padua, where Mantegna lived during the major formative years of his life (from about age 10 to about age 30), exerted a strong influence on his interests, ideas, painting style, and concept of himself. Padua was the first centre of humanism in northern Italy, the home of a great university (founded in 1222), and renowned as a centre for the study of medicine, philosophy, and mathematics. With the influx of scholars from all over Europe and Italy, an atmosphere of internationalism prevailed. From the time of the 14th-century poet Petrarch, Padua had experienced a rapidly growing revival of interest in antiquity, and many eminent humanists and Latin scholars had resided there. Increasing interest in and imitation of the culture of ancient Rome produced a climate in which feverish collecting of antiquities and ancient inscriptions—even if only in fragmentary form—flourished. Mantegna’s friendly relations with several humanists, antiquarians, and university professors are a matter of record, and hence he may be seen as one of the earliest Renaissance artists to fraternize from a position of intellectual equality with such men. In this way, Mantegna’s lifestyle contributed to the early 16th-century ideal of the artist as one so intimately familiar with antique history, mythology, and literature as to be able to draw easily from these highly respected sources.

The experience of the Paduan milieu was thus decisive for the formation of Mantegna’s attitude toward the Classical world, which may perhaps be characterized best as double faceted. On the one hand, Mantegna’s search for accurate knowledge of Roman antiquity was reflected both in his depiction of specific monuments of Roman architecture and sculpture and in his creation of a vocabulary of antique forms that became the language of antique revival for more than a generation of northern Italian painters and sculptors after the mid-1450s. On the other hand, through a process of artistic synthesis, Mantegna sensed the forces and significances below the surfaces of Roman grandeur. The architectural backgrounds of pictures in the Ovetari Chapel, such as the St. James Before Herod and the St. James Led to Martyrdom, as well as of the two paintings of St. Sebastian in Vienna and Paris, were infused with a brooding harshness and severity against which the suffering of the Christian saints took on the added tragic implication of an impending cultural clash that was to separate and alienate the Christian and pagan worlds. In Mantegna’s century, overcoming the experience of alienation from antiquity through the study and revitalization of its architectural and sculptural vocabulary was an obsessive theme. That the Roman world still existed in Italy in ruins only served to increase the sudden sense of cultural loss that struck the 15th century. By his thoroughgoing description of antique forms coupled with an instinctive sense of the political realities that underlay their original creation, Mantegna lent great impetus to the antique revival movement at mid-century.

Mantegna’s starting point had been a still earlier form of antique revival—the monumental Tuscan figure style brought to Venice by the Florentine painter Andrea del Castagno in 1442. Mantegna presumably saw Castagno’s frescoes of evangelists and saints in the church of San Zaccaria during a visit to Venice in 1447. His Venetian connections were strengthened by his marriage in 1453 to Nicolosia, daughter of Jacopo Bellini and sister of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, who became the leading family of painters in Venice during the following decade. Jacopo’s studies in perspective and drawings of fantastic architectural settings based on antique architecture would have interested his new son-in-law, who very likely had studied such drawings during his earlier visit to Venice.

Though Mantegna might have been expected to join the Bellini studio, he preferred to pursue his independent practice in Padua, where the overwhelming artistic influence on him for the preceding few years had come from the wealth of sculpture produced by the Florentine Donatello for the high altar of San Antonio (finished by 1450). Giovanni Bellini’s response to Mantegna’s style has been termed a dialogue, but Mantegna’s reaction to Donatello’s works might more aptly be called a struggle or even a dialectic. The frame and painted architecture of Mantegna’s San Zeno altarpiece (1459) answered the challenge posed by Donatello’s Padua altar, for example. Mantegna’s art always retained echoes of Donatello’s sculpture in its hard, even metallic, surfaces, revealing an essentially sculptural approach that was somewhat softened only in the 1490s.

Years as court painter in Mantua

Mantegna has been characterized as strongly jealous of his independence; yet by entering the service of the marchese di Montova (Mantua), Ludovico Gonzaga, in 1459, he was forced to submit to limitations on his freedom of travel and acceptance of commissions from other patrons. Despite such restrictions, Mantegna journeyed to Florence and Pisa in 1466–67, where he renewed contact with works of art by Donatello, Fra Filippo Lippi, Paolo Uccello, and Andrea del Castagno. During this decade (1460–70), Mantegna produced his finest small-scale works, such as The Circumcision and the Venice St. George.

The Virgin and Child, engraving on laid paper sheet by Andrea Mantegna, …

The Gonzaga patronage provided Mantegna a fixed income (which did not always materialize) and the opportunity to create what became his best-known surviving work, the so-called Camera degli Sposi in the Palazzo Ducale at Mantua. Earlier practitioners of 15th-century perspective delimited a rectangular field as a transparent window onto the world and constructed an imaginary space behind its front plane. In the Camera degli Sposi, however, Mantegna constructed a system of homogeneous decoration on all four walls of the room, mainly by means of highly realistic painted architectural elements on walls and ceilings, which from ground level convincingly imitate three-dimensionally extended shapes. Though the ceiling is flat, it appears concave. Mantegna transformed the small interior room into an elegant open-air pavilion, to which the room’s real and fictive occupants (actually one and the same, since the beholders must have been members of that very court) were transported from deep within an essentially medieval urban castle.

Directly above the centre of the room is a painted oculus, or circular opening to the sky, with putti (nude, chubby child figures) and women around a balustrade in dramatically foreshortened perspective. The strong vertical axis created by the oculus locates the spectator at a single point in the centre of the room, the point from which the observer’s space blends with that of the frescoed figures.

Fresco on the ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi, by Andrea Mantegna, completed 1474. It …

Massimo Listri/Corbis

The realism of the perspective handling of the oculus made it the most influential illusionistic di sotto in suceiling decoration of the early Renaissance. Its implications for the future of ceiling decoration were largely unrealized, however, until the time of Correggio, a major northern Italian painter of the early 16th century, who employed the same type of illusionism in a series of domes in Parma (Italy). Furthermore, the idea of total spatial illusion generated by Mantegna was not fully exploited until inventors of ingenious schemes of ceiling decoration in the Baroque era (the 17th century), such as Giovanni Lanfranco and Andrea Pozzo, utilized a basically identical concept of total illusion dependent upon the location of a hypothetical viewer standing at a single point in the room.

While at the Gonzaga court, Mantegna attained a position of great respect. His close relations with his patron Ludovico were a unique phenomenon at such an early date. As one might expect, the signatures of Mantegna’s paintings reveal intense pride in his accomplishments as a painter. Other than that there are only a few legal records of disputes with his neighbours (from which Ludovico had to rescue him) to provide tentative evidence for the painter’s irascible and contentious personality during his later years. An empathetic viewer may draw many subjective conclusions as to Mantegna’s thoughts and emotions by looking carefully at his paintings.

Ludovico died in 1478, followed soon after by Mantegna’s son Bernardino, who had been expected to carry on his father’s studio. Mantegna’s financial situation was so bad that, in 1484, he was forced to ask for help from the powerful Florentine merchant prince Lorenzo de’ Medici and even contemplated moving to Florence. But Ludovico’s son Federico outlived his father by only a few years, and, with the accession of young Francesco II in 1484, the financial conditions of patronage improved.

Though many of Mantegna’s works for the Gonzaga family were subsequently lost, the remains of nine canvases depicting a Roman triumphal procession, the Triumph of Caesar, begun about 1486 and worked on for several years, still exist. In these paintings, reflecting the classical tastes of his new patron, Francesco, Mantegna reached the peak of his late style. Perhaps it was this new imaginative synthesis of the colour, splendour, and ritualistic power of ancient Rome that brought about Pope Innocent VIII’s commission to decorate his private chapel in the Belvedere Palace in Rome (destroyed 1780), which Mantegna carried out in 1488–90.

Notwithstanding ill health and advanced age, Mantegna worked intensively during the remaining years of his life. In 1495 Francesco ordered the Madonna of the Victory (1496) to commemorate his supposed victory at the Battle of Fornovo. In the last years of his life, Mantegna painted the Parnassus (1497), a picture celebrating the marriage of Isabella d’Este to Francesco Gonzaga in 1490, and Wisdom Overcoming the Vices (1502) for Isabella’s studiolo (a small room in the Gonzaga palace at Mantua embellished with fine paintings and carvings of mythological subjects intended to display the erudition and advanced taste of its patron). A third canvas intended for this program, with the legend of the god Comus, was unfinished when Mantegna died and was completed by his successor at the Gonzaga court, Lorenzo Costa.

Madonna of the Victory, altarpiece by Andrea Mantegna, 1496; in the …

Giraudon/Art Resource, New York

Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue, oil on canvas …

A funerary chapel in the church of S. Andrea at Mantua was dedicated to Mantegna’s memory. Decorated with frescoes, including a dome painted (possibly by Correggio) with paradise symbols related to Mantegna’s Madonna of the Victory, it was finished in 1516. No other 15th-century artist was dignified by having a funerary chapel dedicated to him in the major church of the city where he worked, which attests to the high stature Mantegna came to enjoy in his adopted city.

Assessment

Mantegna’s art and his attitude toward Classical antiquity provided a model for other artists, among them Giovanni Bellini in Venice and Albrecht Dürer in Germany. By placing the Virgin and saints of the S. Zeno altarpiece in a unified space continuous with its frame, Mantegna introduced new principles of illusionism into sacra conversazione paintings (i.e., paintings of the Madonna and Child with saints).

Perhaps of even greater significance were his achievements in the field of fresco painting. Mantegna’s invention of total spatial illusionism by the manipulation of perspective and foreshortening began a tradition of ceiling decoration that was followed for three centuries. Mantegna’s portraits of the Gonzaga family in their palace at Mantua (1474) glorified living subjects by conferring upon them the over-life-size stature, sculptural volume, and studied gravity of movement and gesture normally reserved for saints and heroes of myth and history.

Ludovico Gonzaga, His Family and Court, detail of a fresco by Andrea …

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(1431?-1506). An Italian painter and engraver, Mantegna painted heroic figures, often using a dramatic perspective that gives the viewer the illusion of looking up from below. The effect is somewhat the same as looking up from ground level at statues mounted on a pedestal.